Mariusz Zurawek had a problem. Two months ago, the 26-year-old Polish entrepreneur started seeing what he called “a large growth” of traffic to his website, JustPaste.It, from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria. Consistent with its name, Zurawek's site makes it easy to publish text, photos or PDFs, and at the beginning of this year rebels and civilians in Syria discovered JustPaste.It and began using it to post news. But sometime over the summer, jihadists discovered it as well, and the site soon became one of the favored tools of the Islamic State for sharing news, official communiques, and graphic propaganda. JustPaste. Its appeal stems from its flexibility and convenience: you can upload a variety of file types, tinker with videos and photos, and use a number of formatting tools. The free site also works with right-to-left languages, such as Arabic; there's no requirement to register an account; and it's fast and works well with mobile devices — helpful for a propaganda operation that relies on fighters sharing updates from the field.

When Zurawek discovered what had happened, he set to work purging the site of the worst material. “I have already deleted many of the notes that they have added,” he said in a Skype interview. “Very graphic content — beheadings and stuff like that.” British police contacted him, and they now periodically send him links to terrorist material on his site, which he deletes. He said that he has not heard from American law enforcement.

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The sudden popularity has been a mixed blessing for Zurawek, who recently finished a master’s degree in informatics and econometrics and lives in Wroclaw, a large city in the country’s southwest.

“It’s not my choice that ISIS [the Islamic State] has selected my site,” Zurawek said. “As long as I’m cooperating with the police, removing content, not allowing ISIS to make propaganda, I think it’s good for the site that many people will know about it.”

And many people do: JustPaste. It is now approaching 10 million pageviews a month — extraordinary for a one-person operation — and is now available in seven languages. The site features display ads, making it modestly profitable, and its owner plans to hire some employees, but for now he’s working fiendishly to keep up with the IS postings that violate his strictures against terrorist-related material. “I’m working on the site most of the day,” he admitted.

Zurawek’s story stands in simple contrast to much of the rest of the tech world. In the week since a video of American photojournalist James Foley’s execution was uploaded to YouTube, American tech companies have scrambled to respond to propaganda from the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. Soon after the video appeared online last Tuesday, YouTube began taking it down. Twitter removed offending tweets and banned dozens of IS-connected accounts. As the White House began to float the idea of widening the fight against IS beyond the 100-plus airstrikes it has launched thus far, a general sense formed that tech companies would begin doing more to address extremism in their digital environments — or at least would be open with the public about their standards.

Perhaps most important among these companies is Twitter, which is rapidly becoming a locus of jihadi social media activity, and whose own standards of free speech and fighting for users’ rights are being tested by a coterie of people who regularly post photos of dead bodies and advocate for attacks against Shiites and various Middle Eastern minority groups . Twitter’s policy is generally pretty lenient except in cases where a user violates the law, abuses or harasses others, spams others or issues threats. That might include many IS supporters, who tend to post graphic imagery and advocate violence. (Since the rules are vague, people tweeting in favor of attacks on the Islamic State could be in violation of Twitter policy as well.)

Yet in the days after Foley’s death, something strange happened: very little at all. The video was released on a Tuesday. By Friday, many IS supporters had reappeared on Twitter under new or similar account names — some even bragged about dodging Twitter’s censors . Many of them were defending Foley’s murder or pointed to what they saw as Western hypocrisy over the apparent belief that graphic footage of one American mattered more than the gory photos and videos they had been posting for months. As if to prove the point, some shared photos of the severed heads of Syrian soldiers stationed at Tabqa air base, which IS forces recently captured. (In fact, my own Twitter timeline, on which I follow a number of IS supporters, is as full of photos of decapitations and other atrocities as it’s ever been.)

As the weekend went on, IS began promoting the hashtag #StevensHeadinObamasHands — a reference to the journalist Steven Sotloff, who appeared at the end of the Foley video and who the video’s masked jihadi promised would be killed next. In pushing the hashtag, IS even bought promoted tweets and retweets, working through companies in the Gulf that offer such services. The point was to spread their message, but there was also a more practical motivation: by flooding Twitter with its hashtag, IS could ensure its campaign would be picked up by some popular Arabic-language services that automatically aggregate trending topics.